


sometimes it takes a near-death experience

by Alligates



Category: The Book of Mormon - Parker/Stone/Lopez
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Gunshot Wounds, Hurt Kevin, Injury, M/M, Nail Polish, connor paints kevin's nails, implication of blood but not much description of it, kevin has a gay revelation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 10:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11965791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alligates/pseuds/Alligates
Summary: “I need to talk to him,” Kevin said, words out before he could stop them.Arnold laughed bemusedly. “Why?”I had a gay revelation while I was dying in his arms, Kevin thought, and immediately silenced the thought. “I want to see him,” he said instead.Shit, Kevin, that wasn’t much better, he realized, and from Arnold’s expression he knew it too. If questioned, Kevin would blame it on the drugs.Or: the one where Kevin gets shot by the General after "I Believe", and comes to a few realizations about himself and his feelings for Elder Mckinley.





	sometimes it takes a near-death experience

**Author's Note:**

> heyyyy so I actually wrote this back in march but I didn't have the confidence to post it until now because boy it has been a WHILE. anyway the working title for this was "drowning", do with that information what you will
> 
> all inaccuracies are my own. consume this fluff at your own discretion, it gets real mushy
> 
> enjoy!

At first, there was only the harsh sound of the gunshot, cutting through the air, ringing in Kevin’s ears. He hit the ground at some point. Everything was muffled. There was distant yelling—was it distant? It might have been him.

Then came the pain, like a rod of hot iron twisting into his leg, an ache so profound and deep that he could not locate its epicentre. His breath caught in his throat, his head felt like it was exploding, every movement was a searing mistake—was his leg still all there? He couldn’t tell what was pain and what was the reassuring wiggle of his toes.

He was dropped, and a short yell forced its way out of him before dusty earth became his world. The fire in his leg flared up suddenly, belatedly jarred by his movement, and  _gosh_ that did hurt. All he could do was lie there and try to breathe. He wasn’t sure how successful he was.

There were figures crowded around him—pale, with crisp white shirts and ties and blurry nametags—the other elders. It occurred to Kevin at some point that they were talking to him.

There was a face—two faces?—there were too many, too close to him.

“Elder Price!” someone yelled.

“Are you okay, Elder?”

Clearly not, Kevin wanted to reply, but just then some arms wedged themselves under his back and lifted him into a seated position, and he desperately held back a scream. His vision swam with either vertigo or tears—probably both.

“What happened?” the voices went on, too loud and too distant at the same time.

“Someone call the doctor!” Everything was fuzzy at the edges, the world was slow and numb.

Kevin recognized the first statement as a question, and did his best to answer. “Y-yeah, I…” His hands came up, unbidden, to quiver along with his words in a mockery of grace. “The general shot me, I… uh… I….”

There were too many people around him, too many faces he couldn’t recognize past his haze of pain, all pressing in like the rising tide on a beach, the waves gathering around his head and pulling him into the deep. He was drowning. He brought up his arms to try and shield himself from all the figures, shutting his eyes and escaping into his own mind. What had happened? Words had come from him, when asked, but he couldn’t remember them, couldn’t understand what they meant. Everything hurt so much. 

"Hey! Give him some space!” That was a new voice, but it sent a pleasant spark of familiarity down Kevin’s spine. “Get back, just let him breathe.” There were hands to accompany the voice, gentle yet firm, tugging insistently at the protective barrier in front of Kevin’s face. “Elder Pr—Kevin, can you look at me?”

The sound of his name was enough for Kevin to remove his hands from his face, because someone here wasn’t a stranger, someone  _knew_ him, someone was familiar.

He met the blue, blue eyes of Connor Mckinley, who let out a relieved laugh.

“Good, good! There you are,” Connor was saying. Kevin couldn’t remember having done anything to merit praise, but basked in it nonetheless. “Can you tell us what happened?”

Kevin chose to ignore the ‘us’ that Connor used; as far as he was concerned, it was only the two of them, and there was no one else pressing in, suffocating, urgent, unfamiliar. Nothing else existed—just Kevin, Connor, and a dull memory of pain somewhere before him.

Right, Connor had asked him a question. His mouth knew the answer to that question, even if the rest of him was too rattled to recall. “I went to confront the general,” he said.

Connor’s smile immediately dropped, replaced by something far less pleasant, something far closer to horror. Kevin didn’t like that face. “You went  _alone_? Kevin, he could have killed you! What were you thinking?”

Kevin stared at him, drinking in the sight of Connor Mckinley’s eyes as if they were a lake in the desert. He didn’t mind the drowning so much this time around. “Something incredible,” he said, voice soft, gaze unwavering.

Connor’s expression tightened, and something changed in those eyes. “Kevin—”

“I—I went to the general,” Kevin went on, trying to make sense of it himself as his rational mind floated back towards him on the sea of numbness. “And… and… he shot me,” he said, voice small, as if realizing it for the first time. He glanced down at his leg, and his stomach flipped and his vision blurred before he could process the dark wet mess. “Oh.”

There were hands on his face, fingertips pressing into his jaw, grounding him and pulling his gaze away from his leg. “Hey now, don’t look there, just look at me, alright? You’re doing great. We’re going to get you some help.” It occurred to Kevin, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, that this was a reversal of their positions from when he’d announced that he was going to request a transfer. So much had changed since then, he thought. Or maybe not as much; in both cases, Kevin felt himself leaving.

Connor glanced to the side, eyes searching. “Of all the  _stupid_  things—”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin told him, far more sincere than he thought he would be. He winced, leaning into the hands on his face. “Hurts.”

Connor’s breath hitched, and Kevin saw something fearful dance in his eyes. “I mean, that does make sense, but we’re going to get you help, okay? The doctor is on the way. You’re going to be just fine.” The hands on Kevin’s face drifted downwards, smoothing along his shoulders in a comforting gesture.

There was a warm darkness creeping in at the edges of Kevin’s vision. He hummed a response.

“Kevin? Kevin, wake up.”

Kevin snapped to attention. “What?” When had he closed his eyes?

And then there were Connor’s eyes again, wide and blue and afraid. Kevin didn’t want Connor to be afraid. “I think he’s going into shock. Can—can someone—do we have—can someone get a blanket?”

Kevin recognized those words separately, but put all together they formed a sentiment that he struggled to follow. The world was fading.

“Hey, Kevin, stay with me.”

“I’m with you,” Kevin slurred back, unconvincing even to himself. The pain had faded to a dull ache, far away. He felt a chill, but it came as a relief, an escape from the pressing heat and noise of people all around. He then noticed Connor’s black-clad knees, right beside him, mottled grey from the dusty ground. “Your uniform is getting dirty,” he mumbled.

Connor spluttered out a laugh—it sounded more surprised than mirthful, and more panicked than surprised. “So is yours.”

Kevin was leaning further and further into the hands on his shoulders. There was more movement happening around him, he noticed, but there was a blanket of fog between him and them—everything was vague and slow, time crawling through molasses. He couldn’t see clearly what the world looked like past the orange halo of Connor’s hair. “I—I don’t think I can—” Words tumbled out of his mouth. He heard himself speak as though it were a foreign language.

Connor shook him slightly, voice high with panic. “What? You don’t think you can what?”

Kevin breathed heavily, and looked up. Met those eyes again. Let himself drown, let himself remember, let himself wonder about—Arnold. Arnold probably hated him now, and with good reason; Kevin had abandoned him. His pride and arrogance had always been things his parents had gently chided him for, but not often enough; they were always more likely to praise him for his confidence, raising him higher on his little homemade pedestal. He wasn’t any more important than the other elders here—and he wished it hadn’t taken so much for him to realize it.

He wondered about the confusion he’d felt long ago, about the stories in the Book of Mormon, how none of them really made any sense, how he had forced himself to plaster on a smile and believe in God because that was what he’d been taught, that was what had been expected of him. He didn’t know how he felt about God at this point, and he wondered that he may well be dying in this moment—if there was any time to renew his faltering belief, now would be the time. He realized that he couldn’t quite do it.

He wondered about how Connor’s pale blue eyes were gentle, and soft, and  _kind_  in a way very few things were anymore, and he realized that he was long past the point, he couldn’t—

His voice was the lowest whisper, and Connor had to lean in to hear him: “Turn it off.”

Connor started back in surprise, and their eyes met, blue on brown, for a moment of pure clarity.

Then Kevin let out a shuddered breath as his eyes rolled back in his head and he flopped bonelessly into Connor’s arms.

**

Kevin woke up on unfamiliar, scratchy sheets. His limbs were stiff and his eyelids felt glued together; when he tried to shift around, his leg screamed in pain, and everything came back to him with a gasp. A small whimper of pain escaped when he exhaled, and he forced his eyes open to face the blinding light of reality.

The first thing he noticed was Arnold, sat in a chair, right beside him. They weren’t in the mission centre, but judging by Kevin’s current situation, and the suspicious drowsiness that he felt had something to do with pain medication, he inferred that they were in Gotswana’s hut.

Arnold scooted a bit closer when he saw that Kevin was awake. “That was really, really stupid, you know,” he began, tone dry and sharp in a way that Arnold usually wasn’t. His chair scraped across the floor. “Honestly the dumbest thing ever. So very dumb.”

Arnold just stared at Kevin as he said all this, and Kevin’s mind was too numb to read his expression, so he just took the words and nodded along. In any case, a pretty big part of him, the sensible part, agreed. “Yeah,” he said softly, voice scratchy and catching unpleasantly in his throat.

Something shifted in Arnold’s expression, and then he leapt out of his chair, engulfing Kevin in his arms. “Oh my gosh, Elder Price, I was so  _worried_.” He tightened his embrace around Kevin’s shoulders. “Everyone was. I’m so glad you’re okay.”

Kevin needed a few seconds to fade out of the surprise of suddenly having another body in his space. He slowly brought up his arms to return the hug. “Um, thanks.”

“Look, I….” Arnold leaned back, just enough to look Kevin in the eye. Or, sort of. His gaze nervously darted all around, never alighting too long in one place. “I’m sorry if I was mean to you. Earlier. I just—”

“No, no,” Kevin interrupted, patting his friend’s shoulder to get his attention. “Elder Cunningham,  _I’m_ sorry.” He let out a short sigh. “I thought—I thought I needed to be the perfect Mormon, and I thought that only  _I_  could do it. I was selfish, and arrogant, and… I was horrible to you. I’m sorry.” Kevin wasn’t totally sure if he was making sense, but he needed to get the words out. He needed Arnold to  _understand._

By the way Arnold’s face split into a crooked grin, Kevin figured he’d succeeded. “It’s okay, buddy, I forgive you. You’re my best friend,” Arnold said, before clearing his throat and raising his eyebrows. “But like, that was really, really dumb, though. Elder Mckinley nearly had an aneurysm, dude, you have no idea.”

Kevin’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “Elder Mckinley?”

“Oh, yeah, he was in here earlier. Man, he didn’t want to  _leave_.” Arnold blew out a puff of air that would have been a whistle had he known how to whistle. “He was really worried. I think he felt guilty. He was pacing and yelling and everything. Poptarts forced him to take a break, though. I think he’s back in his room now.”

“I need to talk to him,” Kevin said, words out before he could stop them.

Arnold laughed bemusedly. “Why?”

_ I had a gay revelation while I was dying in his arms _ , Kevin thought, and immediately silenced the thought. “I want to see him,” he said instead.  _Shit, Kevin, that wasn’t much better_ , he realized, and from Arnold’s expression he knew it too. If questioned, Kevin would blame it on the drugs.

Arnold giggled knowingly. “I’ll go get him.”

“No,” Kevin snapped, grabbing his friend’s wrist. He pushed himself up until he was sitting, wincing all the while. “I need to see him.”

“Hey, you shouldn’t be getting up,” Arnold said, but the warning sounded weak to his own ears.

Kevin swung his legs over the bunk and tried to take a step,  _tried_ being the key word. He completely bypassed pain and nearly blacked out when he put weight on his bad leg, and Arnold had to grab him by the upper arms to keep him from falling over. Once his vision returned and he could hear his own harsh breathing, he noticed Arnold was speaking:

“That was dumb.”

Kevin said nothing, grasping his friend’s shoulders as he blinked stars out of his vision. Were there stitches in his leg? Had he ripped them? It certainly felt like he’d ripped something. Maybe that was just standard gunshot wound pain.

“All of this was dumb, you know. We were all really worried. I know I’m repeating myself but I need to make sure you understand how  _super_ dumb this was.”

Kevin groaned and leaned his head into Arnold’s shoulder. He didn’t want to try moving his leg again, but he was standing, so that was a start. And he really, really wanted to talk to Elder Mckinley.

There was a hand on his back, gently nudging him. “I’ll help you walk,” Arnold said, voice soft and resigned in the way one’s voice was when they were fully aware of just how bad of an idea this was, but they were willing to help make it not quite as bad.

Kevin lifted his head. “Arnold—” he started, feeling a slight twinge of annoyance; he needed to talk to Elder Mckinley, to Connor,  _alone_ , he didn’t want  _Elder Cunningham_ to be there, but—

Arnold smiled at him, eyes bright with the innocence of one who forgives too easily. “Yeah, buddy?”

Kevin closed his mouth. He couldn’t walk alone, his drugged brain reminded him, and Arnold had forgiven him for his mistakes, and Kevin was so, so grateful for that—

“Thank you,” he said eventually.

Arnold just beamed and guided him on a steady, painful waddle through the village, towards the mission centre.

**

They burst unceremoniously and inelegantly into the hut, Arnold supporting Kevin almost entirely by this point. Their entry startled Elder Mckinley, who had been passing through the common area on his way to the kitchen.

“Elder Price!” Connor exclaimed, eyes shifting from his face, to Arnold’s arm around him, to the bandages on his leg. Kevin’s pants had been cut short on one side to accommodate the wound. It was a very strange look, and the white bandages were a grim reminder of the necessity for it. “What are you—you really shouldn’t be out of bed—”

Arnold unceremoniously deposited Kevin against the dining table and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder. He fixed Connor with a loaded look. “All yours,” he said, before practically sprinting out of the hut.

Kevin spent a few seconds leaning against the table, gathering his stability, before he straightened as best he could. He met his mission leader’s eyes with all the resolution he could muster. “Elder Mckinley—Connor—we need to talk.”

Connor looked stricken.

Kevin winced. “Okay, no, that’s not how I wanted to start this. That sounded too intense. I’m sorry.”

Connor now looked confused. “Why are you apologizing?”

“Because I—” Kevin took a breath— “because I haven’t been—” No, that wasn’t working either. He closed his eyes for a second and tried to clear his mind. “I’ve been pretty awful.”

“Elder Price—”

“No, I have. I need to own up to it. I already told Arnold, so I might as well tell you, too.” Kevin paused again, fixing Connor with a firm, earnest look so he wouldn’t protest. “When I first got here, I just marched right in, thinking I could be some… some perfect Mormon saviour, or something. The next Joseph Smith.” He bit his lip. “And I thought I could do it all alone, that I didn’t need anyone else’s help. I left my mission companion, and I walked out on—on all of you. And I’m really sorry.”

Connor took a step closer. “Elder Price, it’s okay. You said that after your hell dream—”

“No, I know,” Kevin said, and normally he wouldn’t be one to interrupt a superior, but he needed to make himself clear. He took a breath. “I meant also with—this. With the general. Just—” His mind floated meaninglessly over platitudes before he remembered what Arnold had told him. “I’m sorry if I made you worry, Connor. What I did was stupid, and dumb, and entirely my fault. Besides,” he added in a grumble that was mostly self-directed, “I can’t really convince someone to blindly believe in a religion that I’m having my own doubts about.”

Connor went quiet, dropping his head at the last statement, staring hard at the dining table. “I’ve been having trouble with my beliefs, too,” he said softly.

Kevin’s head snapped up, and he let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Oh.” Did all the missionaries feel this way? The thought made Kevin a bit lightheaded, and he gripped the edge of the table.

Connor cleared his throat, fingers fidgeting, eyes resolutely downcast. “So, what did you mean, earlier?”

Kevin blinked at him. “Huh?” His leg was aching something awful, and he found himself leaning more against the table than was probably necessary. His knuckles were white.

“When you said you…” Connor’s shoulders rose with the breath he took— “couldn’t turn it off?”

“Oh.” Kevin blinked again, hard. There were little black dots floating around in his vision. “Um. A lot of things.” His vision focused, and he met Connor’s wide, concerned blue eyes. Kevin remembered drowning. “One thing in particular, if I’m perfectly honest.”

Connor was still staring at him, but his expression had changed, somehow. Kevin couldn’t read it.

Kevin let out a long breath and nearly forgot to breathe back in. “One specific thing that I don’t really  _want_ to turn off,” he said, words slurred in his rush to get them out.

But then the strength in his arms suddenly vanished, and he staggered against the table. There was something warm trickling down his leg.

“Elder Price!” someone shouted, probably Connor, but he sounded very far away, and Kevin couldn’t even be sure he’d heard it in the first place.

Kevin’s last thought before he hit the ground was  _Damn, maybe I did rip those stitches_.

And everything went black.

**

When Kevin returned to the land of the living, he was back on scratchy bedsheets. His head felt light, like his mind was floating, formless, within the cavity of his skull. The room swam gently before his eyes when he opened them. He chose to associate these symptoms with what was probably a heightened dosage of painkillers.

He let out an ungainly grunt, and was rewarded with the soft clearing of a throat. He rolled his head to face his visitor.

“Oh,” Kevin said, blinking in surprise, “hello.”

Connor Mckinley, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed, merely raised his eyebrows. “You’re not allowed to leave your room anymore, and since you were so desperate to talk to me, I thought I’d just stay here to prevent you from bringing yourself to further harm.”

The last part held a little bit of a chiding tone, and Kevin tried to look properly chastised. He felt slightly disconnected from his body, and wasn’t sure how much of his face truly responded.

Connor’s face broke into a small smile. “Now that’s twice in only a few hours that you’ve fainted in my vicinity, Elder Price,” he said, sounding faintly amused, but his eyes were soft with concern.

Kevin blinked at him and smacked his lips together, still not fully awake. “Did I rip my stitches?” he mumbled.

“You did,” Connor affirmed, “and it was very reckless of you to move around like that.” He let out a short breath. “It could have been a lot worse, you know. You’ve been awfully lucky so far.”

Kevin bit his lip. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll be more—careful. From now on.”

“Now that I’m here?” Connor teased, before his words caught up with him, and he flushed a lurid shade of pink.

Kevin just smiled at him, dopey and bleary-eyed and far too open, and that only seemed to make the blushing worse.

Connor cleared his throat and reached behind him, emerging with a little clear bottle filled with a blue liquid. He wasn’t meeting Kevin’s eyes.

Kevin, for his part, gazed steadily at the bottle, trying to discern its meaning. It was a pale blue, not quite like the sky, but more like a mountain in the distance. It wasn’t the friendly, intoxicating blue of Connor’s eyes— _Oh, Kevin, you’re so fucked, wow_ , he told himself, stopping that thought right in its tracks.

He interrupted his inner monologue when he realized Connor was speaking. “I figured we could, um, pass the time. While we… talk.” Connor took in a shuddery breath, and Kevin recognized the bottle to be nail polish. “So,” Connor went on, flushing a truly impressive shade of red, “if you don’t want, I can just—”

Kevin held out his hand, almost daintily, for Connor to take, fingers extended in relaxed elegance.

Connor bit back a nervous laugh and settled for a pleased grin, hesitantly taking the proffered hand between his own. He noted the slender, strong fingers, the smooth palm, the only-slightly-worried quality of his cuticles. The hand wasn’t much bigger than Connor’s own, but it still felt weird to hold it. Or, maybe not weird, but—something. Something Connor usually tried mentally to avoid altogether.

They talked about everything and nothing as Connor concentrated on perfecting the blue coats of polish and Kevin tried to drill his focus back through the haze of medication. Neither especially wanted to be the one to pick up their conversation from earlier. Subsequently, their words weren’t especially driven, both parties being focused on their own personal endeavour not to say anything of true meaning.

“So, the mission president is coming by soon,” Connor said. In this small, timeless space, with Kevin Price’s hand held gently in his grip and his mind hovering on the edge of a secret, he couldn’t bring himself to feel worried.

“Oh, wow, really,” Kevin said blandly, eyes glued to Connor’s fingers as they expertly wielded the tiny brush and applied even coats of product to a hand from which Kevin was trying not to feel detached.

“Yeah, we’re kind of freaking out about it,” Connor hummed, voice flat, dipping the brush back into the little bottle.

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Kevin said, words devoid of any meaning.

Connor went on humming, slipping into a half-recognizable melody that Kevin knew from hearing Connor belt it out in the shower every now and then.

The tune washed over Kevin like a warm blanket of comfort and home, and he found his eyelids drooping with fatigue. He shook himself awake, and tried valiantly to resume their conversation. “That’s a very pretty colour,” he said. “You’re very good at colours.”

Connor smiled at him, a bit bemused. “Thank you?”

Kevin frowned. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I think Gotswana upped my dosage of painkillers. Or maybe this is just how I feel around you.”

There was a beat of silence, wherein Connor’s eyes went very wide and Kevin’s mind caught up to his words.

“Wait, I—I mean—”  _Oh my gosh, what was that?_  He faltered to an inelegant stop, hiding his face in one hand because  _oh gosh, oh Heavenly Father, oh fucking hell_ , Connor was still holding the other one.

Kevin kept his eyes shut, mind racing a million miles an hour—well, maybe half that, because drugs—to find the words to fix this.  _Hey_ , he warned himself as his mind began to half-formulate a plan,  _maybe it’s a bad idea to admit my feelings for him while he’s holding my hand so gently I think I might die_.

“It’s just that I—I like you.”  _So much for not going with that plan._ “A lot.”  _Please stop._ “Um, yeah.”

Heat rose to his face, and Kevin suddenly became hyper-aware of far too many things at once. The starchy white sheet scraped ever so lightly against his forearm as he shifted. There was a tiny fleck of mountain-blue on the tip of Kevin’s index finger, where Connor had just been applying a second coat. He felt it hovering above the grooves of his skin, settling in tightly just a second later. Connor’s knuckle tickled the centre of his palm, sending millions of electrical impulses firing up his arm. He felt the precise moment that Connor’s entire body froze up, before he relaxed, tension sighing out of his shoulders, and resumed applying light strokes of product onto Kevin’s index finger, brushing away what he could of the single imperfection right at the tip with the gentlest of touches. But Kevin could see that the other boy’s face was red, so red, darker than his hair. Connor’s eyes were trained resolutely on their joined hands, eyelashes not so much as flickering, but his cheeks were raised in a smile.

“Kevin,” Connor said, voice soft and a bit distracted, “I might do something a little ill-advised.”

Kevin blinked. “Um, okay.”

He quickly forgot the remark, and hardly dared breathe as Connor continued painting his nails, not wanting to disrupt the perfect hush that had fallen over the room. Connor went back over every blue nail with a clear substance from another little bottle, carefully smoothing out any irregularities of coverage. The little brush flicked off Kevin’s pinky with a little flourish, and Connor blew lightly on the wet fingertips. His breath was warm on Kevin’s skin, and he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

Connor released his hand with a satisfied little sigh. “All done. Don’t touch it.”

Kevin was slightly saddened that Connor wasn’t holding his hand anymore, but he was pleased with the glossy blue of his fingertips. He inspected Connor’s handiwork. “Wow, they’re really pretty—”

Connor turned Kevin by the chin and fitted their mouths together. Kevin let out a surprised little noise and forgot his own name, losing himself to the newfound and almost foreign sensitivity of his lips. He closed his eyes, pressing in closer with something that was half tenderness and half desperation. He kept his freshly painted hand clear out of the way, stuck in the air, to preserve Connor’s work.

He thought he had known drowning, but this was another experience altogether. A thousand oceans flooding his lungs would not have had the same intensity of feeling.

It was Connor who pulled away first, red-faced and smiling. Kevin chased his mouth for a second before he caught himself, eyes flickering open. He was almost surprised to find the room was still just as they had left it, clean and intact. Kevin felt as though a tornado had just ripped through him. His lightheadedness was decidedly not just from the pain medication.

Connor let out a slightly breathless laugh at Kevin’s gaping expression. “Was that… okay?”

Kevin stammered out a few incoherent noises. Words? What were those? How did he make them happen with his mouth?

Connor tilted his head, and a sliver of worry crept into those blue eyes, and Kevin couldn’t allow that. He forcefully stuck out his hand, the one devoid of nail polish, and awkwardly gripped Connor’s fingers, perhaps too tight. He loosened his grip and spread his hand, palm down.

He cleared his throat. “Please. It—um. Yes.” He scowled at his own inability to speak. He was  _Kevin Price_ , for crying out loud. Kevin Price stammered for no one.

Connor giggled, pulling the little bottles back out, eyes dancing with fondness, and as Kevin found himself melting under that gaze, he realized that maybe Kevin Price stammered for one person, and maybe that was okay.

Kevin tried not to shiver as Connor interlaced their fingers, just for a moment. “So much for turning it off, huh?” he blurted.

Connor smacked his arm.

Kevin blamed the drugs. And if the real reason was Connor’s mere presence, he would never admit it.

And if he fell asleep holding Connor’s hand, it was also because of the drugs. And not at all because Connor felt like home.


End file.
